If you study physics or astronomy, you get to learn about stuff that’s really only just been published. If you’re a biologist or a chemist, recent discoveries form a big part of your studies. Historians consider the modern era fair game, and no English Literature course would be complete without

If you’ve been reading the ninja secrets over the last year or so, you’ll have noticed that adjusting by percents is a big part of ninjary, but I’ve never really explained how to do it. Let me put that right. It works pretty much as you’d expect: you work out

Happy Black Friday to my American friends. While you’re waiting in the queues for the shops to open, how about dropping me a silly question? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what time Macy’s opens, but ask me one about maths!

“[In this context] Co- just means ‘opposite’ — so a co-mathematician is a machine for turning theorems into ffee.” — Miles () Matt Parker () laid down a challenge on Day 1 of the MathsJam conference: he said that proof by MathsJam was acceptable, because if it wasn’t true, you

0.7 doesn’t sound like a magical number — at best, it’s a relatively obscure decimal. It’s in a fairly comfortable ‘higher than average’ zone, I suppose, if you’re looking at probabilities, but… well, it’s one of the Mathematical Ninja’s favourite numbers. It comes up in two major places: $\ln(2) \simeq

“If you had an infinite number of monkeys, there’d be no room for typewriters.” — Jason Arnopp Yes, an infinite number of monkeys would eventually — in fact, before very long at all — write Shakespeare. The problem, then, is finding which of the monkey-poo-smeared manuscripts is actually the whole